ARTISTS & WRITERS IN RESIDENCE

Texas After Violence Project is proud of our artists and writer-in-residence. Each year, we invite artists and writers whose work centers on the impacts of state-sanctioned violence to build alongside our archives of memory and healing, and to interact with transformative and restorative justice. During the residency, we hope to carve out a space for artists and writers to imagine and create dynamic pieces that deal with the textured nuance of the carceral state and what narrative power can look like, can change, and can mean. This creative work can animate the realities of mass incarceration, the impacts of state-sanctioned violence, and the need for narrative power — and can expand upon the interviews and materials in our archives.

Our current artist-in-residence is Mark Menjivar, and our previous artist-in-residence was Hollis Hammond. Our current writer-in-residence is Juania Sueños, with previous writers-in-residence being Jorge Antonio Renaud and Faylita Hicks.

FROM THE ARCHIVE

Juania Sueños

2022

Unamerican Dreams: Immigrant Stories Interrupted by the State

A 2022 Visions After Violence Community Fellow and current writer in residence, Sueños centers her work on honoring the dreams of loved ones who have suffered because of state-created borders. Sueños herself was undocumented for most of her life until recently. Her firsthand experience and the loss of family members to deportation activated her and her work to contribute to abolitionist and activist efforts.

Mark Menjivar

2022 & 2023

DLP: Mirror (Mark Menjivar)

Through a multi-channel sound and architectural installation, the artist explores the story of David Lee Powell and the musical score he composed while incarcerated on death row.

Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia, PA.

2021

How to Read a Vessel: DLP  

Images from the “DLP” installation, part of Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the Justice System at CAMH. “DLP” represents the full contents of David Lee Powell’s cell at the time of his execution in 2010, after spending 32-years on death row.

Art Gallery of Burlington,
Burlington,
Ontario, Canada

2020

Walls Turned Sideways: 
 Artists Confront the Justice System  
Tufts University Art Galleries , Boston, MA.

 

– Please Form a Straight Line

 

– Birds, Rats, Roses, Sala

2018

Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the Justice System

Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Houston, TX.

Hollis Hammond

2021

Awake in the Dark is a multimedia exhibition resulting from a collaboration between visual artist Hollis Hammonds and poet Sasha West. The pieces begin what Timothy Morton calls “grief work,” articulating the experience of living in the midst of a fragile, changing ecosystem. Through self-interrogations, the artists question both individual and societal contributions to environmental crisis. Viewers dwell in wreckage, suspended between flood and fire, stasis and loss. Objects lose their meaning as markers for a normal existence. In these works, the distinction between natural and human-made disasters starts to collapse. Hammonds and West invite viewers to see anew their own part in making the physical world and, thus, the future.

Awake in the Dark was on view at the Austin Public Library Gallery, Nov. 1 – Dec. 2, 2021. Reception: November 6, 2021, 2 – 4 PM.

“Awake in dark: How Hollis Hammonds and Sasha West ask us about our role in the environmental crisis,” Sightlines Magazine, by Jeanne Claire van Ryzin, November 21, 2021. 

Send in the Needles

poem by Jorge Antonio Renaud
illustration by Hollis Hammonds
Send in the Needles Illustration. Art by TAVP artist-in-residence Hollis Hammonds, Poem by TAVP writer-in-residence Jorge Antonio Renaud. Image courtesy of Hollis Hammonds.
Send in the Needles Illustration close up. Image courtesy of TAVP artist-in-residence Hollis Hammonds.

Send in the Needles

I have no grand words for you,
nothing noble from the rough coast of exile.
Just our coughs, low and discreet,
and the squeaks as the gurneys glide past,
piled high with the properly dead.

What eloquence did you seek?
What gospel of mine
could ring its melancholy bell
enough to bring you jangling by,
belts sagging with your weight,
chrome keys held just so,
to soothe my buzz and whine?

Look. The rain quit cooling long ago
and yet you peel away your silk and
dance for clouds.
Hand in hand you whirl, in step,
as if you still wore flowers in your hair.
As if your chants still mattered.
As if they ever did.

The scent of powder;
fire & fuse.
The fall of hammer;
bang & boom.
The clink of mortar;
more & more.
It’s all you’ve ever known.

We live in dreams
and slip through nights,
our blood exultant.
We leave our flesh upon the wire,
the scabs still weeping when we wake.

We are mad, in legions,
insects in our skulls.
What do you do?
Slice squares through iron;
enough to push their pills on through;
enough to peer at what lies huddled here.

We dull, ten times ten times ten
again and again times two
and still
they see no need to feed our eyes.

We are speechless.
Ranks upon ranks.
Our tongues are broken.
We cannot speak of pain; it fills the world
and yet, you dance.

Muteness has a fine appeal.
Tear out each other’s throat;
you’ll see it makes for strangled cries.

Send in the needles.
There are worse ways to die.